Their Side – Bloggers knew FOIA emails were coming

I just had a phone conversation with Leslie Kaufman of the NYT on the ‘hacker’. She was careful to call the FOIA people by that PC name. Rule 1 – Don’t offend the witness unless you want them upset. I didn’t really want to do the interview because these things don’t usually go well for me and it took me several days to make time. Unfortunately my Achilles heel is that I tend to say what I think. — I know you are all surprised.

She asked several questions about the hacker and said that her job was to investigate that aspect and not the climategate emails – which she believed had been covered. Of course I took a little time to explain the science of the issue and even brought up the conversations between the Dept of Energy and Phil Jones. In general, she seemed to repeat the opinions of the climategate committees despite the blindingly obvious problems in meshing any of their conclusions with reality. She said it was well covered that the researchers hadn’t been ‘open enough’. If that is the limit of the curiosity of your audience, it didn’t seem worth getting into.

One thing I did make clear and have made clear before, I don’t want to know who the FOIA gourp/person is because I’m not going to be willing (or technically able) to protect them – so if FOIA.org reads this, don’t tell me. My life is fine the way it is and the last thing I need is a leftist Justice department with an overstock of rubber gloves visiting my home. Leslie was very interested in whether I knew who the ‘hacker’ is. I had to tell her several ways and times that I really don’t know. I even told her that I used to think it was a student, to which she later questioned why I don’t think it is a student any longer. (Implying that I knew something). Hopefully, you can understand the direction of the interview from this. She said it was her mandate to follow this portion of the story.

For the readers here, it isn’t that I don’t believe it was a student, it is that I don’t know either way. Some friends with more knowledge than I on computers have pointed out some fairly technically sophisticated behavior in the releases which make me reconsider. I brought up the RC hack to Leslie, pointing out that no adult with sensitive information would release it that way. It’s a prank-like behavior. Of course, there is a certain narcissism which comes with a hacker mentality that sometimes delays the adult thought process. When I was in college, a stunt like that would sound like fun. Now — NO effing way.

I once met a 25 year old guy who had been caught hacking, and later hired by a security company. Despite having been “caught”, he was so cock-sure that he was flat nauseating. Either too dumb to know he wasn’t as smart as he thought or too young to have the social skill to refrain from flaunting his smarts. It is a culture of some computer programmers (sorry guys), which the ‘adult’ of my story believed he had risen to the top of. — Look what I can do! I often wonder if the hacker culture recognizes the vastly superior work built into the technology of the things which they program on.

This is not to say that FOIA.org released the emails out of narcissism or proof of superiority. Readers here understand that. Instead, it was done of understanding with a slight hint of that hacker mentality. They/he/she hold a recognition that the math and science are being perverted, data was absolutely covered up where necessary and the known results were without a doubt exaggerated to promote the cause. In my conversation with Leslie, I took the time to explain that I was not a denier and that any scientifically minded person knows full well that the basic effect of CO2 warming is incontrovertibly true. She suggested to describe me as a Lukewarmer, to which my reply was that I don’t even like that name because I don’t know how much warming there will be but due to current political mechanisms, there is a systematic exaggeration of the science.

Anyway, the most interesting point of the conversation came out when she said in very rough paraphrase ‘Their side is that the email releases were known to you ahead of time.’

The ‘their side’ was fairly interesting as we know the “Climate Scientists™” are in good contact with the NYT as are the government agencies. It could have been nothing but often when you hear inflection of how something is said, you can get the meaning. I took it as though she had been talked too by someone of the opinion that the three blogs mentioned in the DOJ letter were intimately involved.

The fact that I have done nothing wrong does not relieve me one tiny bit regarding the police. This is especially true when a billion dollar industry is involved. Those who haven’t dealt with law won’t get that. What gives me comfort is that this blog and its global friends have a wide readership means that ANY direct police action will have a wide public audience – not that it will stop the crazy stuff anyway. That is the limit of my protection.

As I have written before, I think Leslie has it right. Some powerful idiot(perhaps a congressman), who doesn’t understand blogs, internets (love the plural) or techie things in general with more than one button, thinks that the bloggers were in direct communication with FOIA. This is the single reason that I can make sense of for the confiscation of Tallbloke’s computers. Any other potential communications can be taken in pristine form right from the blog logs at WordPress.

Anyway, the conversation came across as some verification of my theory on why Tallboke had his computers confiscated. As always, I reserve the right to revise and extend my remarks.

The above is consistent with the obviously too fanciful-to-be-true idea that somebody has been as pushy as Michael Mann can be, contacting law enforcement agencies and newspaper journalists the world over until something got done (Tallbloke’s computers taken away).

Certainly there’s nobody at Penn State who would see himself as surrounded by denialist conspiracies that need combating.

MikeNsaid

What’s funny is the person who has a whole site dedicated to finding out who FOIA is, put up a post at ClimateAudit that the readers didn’t get, but looking at it now it looks like he knew this release was coming. “FOIA, get in touch with me. What do you want? My email is frank @ mail-on.us”

bobsaid

The whole issue is frustrating to me. I don’t care who released the emails, and unless somebody is a conspiracy theorist, they probably don’t care, either.

The foia dude will be a footnote in history, while the emails will get an entire chapter in how bad science is made. Grant hogs like Mann and the Team will be highlighted in the junk science category, and their shoddy work will follow them like a bad dream for the rest of their lives.

I don’t blame you, Jeff, for being a bit paranoid about the Feds. They can do about anything they want as the Fast and Furious program illustrates. They can get people killed, and the government has no liability.

That was a really funny remark about the availability of rubber gloves for justice department agents. Well, maybe not so funny.

curioussaid

“If there was a tougher moment over the last 40 years to be a leader in the American environmental movement, it would be hard to put your finger on it. The earth is warming, perhaps catastrophically, yet legislative efforts to cap carbon emissions collapsed in 2010. Global carbon limits have been equally elusive, as a conference in Durban, South Africa, showed again last week.”

“Leslie Kaufman is a national environmental reporter for The New York Times.”

Who gives Leslie her remit? When she says it is her job to only investigate the “hacking” issue, who does she perceive in the media has investigated the wider issues? What was the point of her interview with you? Is the release of the CRU emails an environmental story? etc

kramersaid

“This is especially true when a billion dollar industry is involved. ”

It’s more than that. The entire technocratic version of the future world is at stake if the solutions to AGW are stopped….and the big bankers who have their carbon derivates ready to rake it in on the $20 trillion dollar a year carbon trading market.

Ruhrohsaid

Jeff;
I think the point of all of this is to ‘establish the narrative’ regarding CG2, which is to be that ‘you guys were in on the conspiracy’ to release CG2 just before Durban.

I’m sure that someone ran ‘focus groups’ or the like, to find a theme that would resonate with ‘the public’ in the desired way, so as to taint the credibility of the releasers of the CG2 info.

It is not obvious that awareness of this purported ‘narrative’ would have allowed you to get through to ‘Leslie'; you either ‘admit’ conspiracy or ‘deny’ it, and you lose either way, as people who ‘deny’ conspiracy sometime lie about it.

For example, consider that prima facie fraudulent Certificate of Live Birth released by the O campaign before the election. The fonts were wrong, the text placement was wrong, the security border was very clumsily photoshopped, there were toner flecks all over the place, and the datestamp ink had soaked through from the backside. Clearly it had been solvent washed and reprinted. But ‘they’ were able to establish the narrative that anyone who questioned O about this fraud, were lunatic racists who said he was born in Africa. Have you ever heard anyone talk about the fraud without mentioning ‘Kenya’ ? Kenya is not germane. The real question is, why release the badly forged C.of L B?
It’s all about establishing the narrative for ‘the folks’. They’ll go down the same path every time once they’re led down it.

#6 Kramer: “The entire technocratic version of the future world is at stake if the solutions to AGW are stopped….and the big bankers who have their carbon derivates ready to rake it in on the $20 trillion dollar a year carbon trading market.”

kimsaid

I think the belief that ‘our’ side knew they were coming has two sources. One is that many skeptics hoped that there were more emails coming, hope leading to desire leading to expectation. The other is that the ‘Team’ knew there was far worse available, knowledge leading to fear leading to expectation.

Yes, Leslie, you can quote me, but talk to Andy Revkin first.
=========

i didnt know. but I suspected that RC had contacted frank. That was probably a false assumpton . But frank showed
up out of nowhere demanding to talk to RC and asking him what he wanted. That got me thinking and it made perfect sense.
maybe for the wrong reasons. we wont know.

GHowesaid

In all of the AGW debate, the bias of the NYT, Guardian et al is somewhat expected. What has surprised me is the bias of some of the scientific journals (ie Nature). The latest dust-up in the news about journals publishing the “how-to” of creating a transmittable bird flu virus makes me shake my head. Seems like many ways to skin this cat.

curioussaid

2) Take a moment to honestly evaluate your own scientific education and skills especially wrt. stats and applied maths. Maybe you are expert in these areas – a bit of googling didn’t turn up your CV. Apologies if I’ve missed it. The nearest I found was this from 2003 and it may not be you:

“JC comment: To me, the emails argue that there is insufficient traceability of the CMIP model simulations for the the IPCC authors to conduct a confident attribution assessment and at least some of the CMIP3 20th century simulations are not suitable for attribution studies. The Uncertainty Monster rests its case (thank you, hacker/whistleblower).”

4) Here at tAV I’d suggest looking at the posts on the Antarctic which resulted in a Journal Published paper which showed a somewhat different story to the one which you may have seen at Nature magazine:

j fergusonsaid

Jeff.
To take a second or two away from the gymnastics, I share your fear of the government. My wife’s comment when a letter from the IRS showed up at our business was that she had never thought that a face could actually turn white when the blood drained out. Fortunately it was a false alarm, they hadn’t understood something in our return, but it still took three years and a couple of tree’s of letters to make it go away.

The 1937 movie starring Paul Muni ” I was a fugitive from a chain gang” describes how two WW1 vets could take a nickle off a diner counter to use in a pay telephone, be arrested, sent to a chain gang, escape, build respectable lives, be recognized and sent back to the chain gang, seems to have made quite an impression on me.

That anyone could think that any of the bloggers invited, or conspired to urll, the first or even second batches of emails surfaced is very worrisome. There is a comment over at Bishop’s today that reports an article with an interview of a cyber-terrorism “expert” who suggests blogger actions and intents which far exceed in aggression anything I’ve read in a few years of reading these things.

steveta_uksaid

j ferguson (8:34) said “when a letter from the IRS showed up at our business was that she had never thought that a face could actually turn white when the blood drained out.”

I know that feeling – a heart stopping moment when I opened a letter from the UK Revenue that told me I owed £37,000 (about $60,000).

After I recovered , I carefully read how they’d come to this conclusion, which was that they’d assumed that a six-week contract at extortionate rates I’d managed to land a year earlier was still on-going.

So I filled in the response section – “If you disagree with this assessment, enter how much you believe you owe” – where I wrote £0.00 and returned the letter, and never heard another word about it.

I have been grappling with commenting on this topic for the same reasons as you, I don’t see a need to expose FOIA, even through accurate speculation. They did the right thing in the face of a lot of wrong doing.

Not to mention I to don’t need to add complications to my already complicated life.

But I am confident this was not the work of a hacker. If they were a hacker, they would not worry about filtering out personal or irrelevant information. No, the data was clearly being collected for a FOIA dump by CRU and someone just conformed with the law (which is one reason I don’t think they will disclose the source).

I think I will post my musings sometime next week, since the more I think about the more I conclude FOIA is not only protected, but known by authorities and CRU. And they appear to be untouchable. The reasons they may be untouchable is what I find interesting.

Kim – 28: School is out, Andy may not have access to a computer any more. Must be a teacher (the pretentious call themselves “educators”), with that much hate for the Fraser Institute. FI have this thing about the education industry (my term) suggesting that teachers should be rated on performance rather than upon seniority. Horrors.

kimsaid

kimsaid

“Any other potential communications can be taken in pristine form right from the blog logs at WordPress.”

Yes, but the thing I had no-one else had was the earliest download of the FOIA2011.zip
Reading between the lines of the conversation I had with the Detective Inspector the other day, they wanted a copy of that for ‘best evidence’. Which gives me hope that they are at least keeping the options open on actually getting around to investigating the content as well as the provenance of the download.

Frank Swifthack’s ongoing analysis of the 2009 release was quite informative, but it seems that in recent months he’s fallen off the deep end. It’s hard to tell whether he’s a stark raving madman or if his rantings are a deliberate ruse intended to ruffle the feathers of skeptics.

Kim: It all very Kafka-esque. By their refusal to supply a copy of ‘the information’ backing the granting of the warrant, it is obvious they don’t want me to know what is going on in their minds. So why should I let them know what’s in mine?

When you say the first download, did you mean that the link was dropped at your site first or you were the first to download the link?

I don’t see that there would be any information advantage. My guess is that you got hit first because it is far easier for authorities to go into your home legally than in the US and you are (were) suspected of knowing who FOIA is.

Kenneth Fritschsaid

“I just had a phone conversation with Leslie Kaufman of the NYT on the ‘hacker’. She was careful to call the FOIA people by that PC name. Rule 1 – Don’t offend the witness unless you want them upset. I didn’t really want to do the interview because these things don’t usually go well for me and it took me several days to make time. Unfortunately my Achilles heel is that I tend to say what I think. — I know you are all surprised.”

Jeff, why oh why would you consent to an interview with these people. It is nice to see yourself quoted in the NYT, but what I read in the print media of late is that these “journalists” start with a premise and then work backwards to fill in their story with “facts” that support the premise – kind of like we see from the IPCC. I always wonder if people with POVs differing from the journalist/publication that they consent to interview with actually think that they will be allowed to make their point or, for that matter, get their correct POV across to the public. The more conventional media like print are going to become dinosaurs because of their preference for a conducting one way conversations and crusading.

Notice that the video clip of Tallbloke from the BBC talks about the climategate emails as being hacked as if that is a proven fact. The BBC message also noted that the involved scientists had been exonerated from doing wrong. There is no doubting that the investigations of the scientists were less than thorough. Notice also the sequence of interested parties doing their “investigations” and then the media references to those investigations without a word about the quality of the investigations. We see a similar situation in climate science whereby a poor quality paper/study gets published and from then on gets to be quoted and referenced in future papers/discussions without qualification.

The recent debate over the payroll tax cut for two months was reported by the MSM and Barrack Obama as a $1000 tax cut when in fact the two months respite legislated would amount to about $170. When I saw a reporter reminded of this when giving misleading details on the amount of the cut she mumbled something like, well everyone knows it will be extended. That is not journalism but rather being an active advocate in a political battle and playing the politics over the facts of the matter.

j fergusonsaid

“Best Evidence” is a legal term which is often applied to evidence that is not quite the best that “could” be out there, but is definitely the best available. An example would be a photocopy of a letter where the original is unobtainable.

Is there any chance that the file sent to Tallbloke was “more original” than those sent elsewhere. for example, could it have come directly from the Secret Sharer while the others were copies of Tallbloke’s version. What would make one version of a digital file better than another?

Jeff, if you don’t want speculation to appear here about the investigation and what to some of us seem plausible scenarios regarding the Leaker and the Secret Sharer, say so, and I’ll quit speculating on the subject, here or anywhere else – damage would be similar in any case.

Paul Linsaysaid

Regarding the identity of FOIA: I’m guessing that he is an insider and a lefty. He was a believer and turned on them when he realized that AGW was no longer about saving the earth and helping the poor but just a massive scheme to transfer wealth to the insiders and line the pockets of the wealthy. He’s pretty clear about this in the intro to CG2.

gallopingcamelsaid

“Jeff, why oh why would you consent to an interview with these people. It is nice to see yourself quoted in the NYT, ”

I really don’t give one crap about being put in the NYT. Perhaps I should – but I don’t. No excitement, no interest, not one single emotion – except – i don’t want it. Odd, but true. If not one article is written about our conversation—meh….

After several emails from Leslie, I decided that no matter what she writes it won’t matter. If she misstates my opinions, we’ll have some fun for a few days.

MikeNsaid

Steve, yes, I still don’t get why the 3 month delay for Frank to reopen his site. It’s not very likely it took him that long to notice a post at BishopHIll’s. So did someone tip him off late, or did he get some other tip, and just used that as an excuse? And do you think that RC post was legit?

World leaders are actually totally powerless over the forces that power the Sun and control Earth’s changing climate. Having been caught promoting misinformation on the origin, composition and source of energy for the Earth-Sun system, world leaders are now desperately trying to stay in office as

I don’t know whether I got the first copy, but it was the middle of the night US time, and I was the first to follow up the link comment from ‘foia’ on Climate Audit, and the first to write a post breaking the news. It probably didn’t help that I stated it with the words “Our old friend ‘foia’…” which could easily be misinterpreted as a personal familiarity.

I agree that there is no information advantage in retrospect, but the police say they have to be duly diligent in attempting to keep the chain of evidence as ‘pure’ as possible. The fact that I was only three counties away and subject to draconian British National Security provisions which can be applied to anyone on pretexts they don’t have to disclose helps of course…

steveta_uksaid

page488said

The bullying tactics of the press/government are not new; they are just more widespread now.

Thirty year ago my family owned a number properties on which sat gas stations owned by independent oil companies. Based on the provisions of the Clean Water Act of 1972, the small oil companies were harassed into failure and the property onwers were held responsible for any so-called pollution on the property (actually, first line of those held “responsible” were the tank owners, but it really doesn’t matter because the responsibility fell to the property owners if the oil company owners failed – which they did – in droves).

Steve Milloy wrote an excellent article about this.

Independent oil companies disappeared by the middle of the 1980’s – they could not afford to compete in a world where they (essentially) had to pay huge sums of “gold” to the lord of the new fiefdom (the government thru the EPA) in order to operate. At that time we saw the birth of “Big Oil” companies, now reviled by the same people who created them (anyone up for an irony party).

It is interesting to note, as an aside, that in my experience, the minute amounts of petroleum pollution on the afore-mentioned properties, after having been studied ad infinitum and monitored for years by government approved environmental corporations, were deemed to be harmless. Please make note – it took over 20 years for the goverment to reach these conclusions. By that time “Big Oil” was well established as the government’s chosen energy provider.

Also note that the only prople who made any money during this time were the privately held environmental corporations.

The CAGW “crisis” is just more of the same, and it’s the same people or their descendents, who are propagating this.

These people ar NIHILISTS; they won’t go down in flames. Once deprived of one victory (in their eyes) they will just move on to another bogus cause.

What do they want? I can guess that they want and expect the same control held by the Catholic Church during the middle ages. Complete control of the populace.

j fergusonsaid

Page488,
I’ve been trying very hard to understand the religious disputes in 16th and 17th century England, in an effort to discover a similarity with what seemed to me “religious” disputes (non-factual based environmentalism) in our time. I finally realized that the disputes in England were political not really religious despite the religious language of the arguments, and the likely large number of disputants who actually thought they were contending religious issues.

It must be the same today where the dispute is political even though the arguments “seem” to be environmental. After reading the text of some of the treaty elements considered at Durban, I can readily see how all the greenery fits into a plan for some people to tell the rest of us how to live.

I posted this earlier at WUWT, but it is equally at home here. Perhaps the NYT reporter will read it and make a simple deduction. I doubt it.

“Let’s not forget that this whole mess began with a concerted, deceitful, pretextual conspiracy to obstruct and wrongfully deny lawful FOIA requests made by taxpaying citizens seeking DATA to REPLICATE the findings of various PUBLICLY FUNDED scientists published in PEER REVIEWED journals which had failed to enforce their own DATA ARCHIVING requirements upon the published authors.

FOIA, outraged that the world’s poorest inhabitants will be further immiserated by future climate policies, took matters into his/her own hands to expose the bias of the most influential climate scientists and their relentless contempt for anyone who uttered the unforgiveable words- “PROVE IT”. The release of emails by FOIA is virtuous civil disobedience, and should be judged as such. The recruitment of governmental power in furtherance of a conspiracy against scientific transparency, dissent and the free exchange of information should be a cause of deep concern to anyone who values liberty.”

[…] Jeff Id (Condon) over at Air Vent has been of the opinion FOIA.org was a younger person, technically very adept and still a bit of romantic at heart: For the readers here, it isn’t that I don’t believe it was a student, it is that I don’t know either way. Some friends with more knowledge than I on computers have pointed out some fairly technically sophisticated behavior in the releases which make me reconsider. I brought up the RC hack to Leslie, pointing out that no adult with sensitive information would release it that way. It’s a prank-like behavior. Of course, there is a certain narcissism which comes with a hacker mentality that sometimes delays the adult thought process. When I was in college, a stunt like that would sound like fun. Now — NO effing way. […]

Steve McIntyresaid

Leslie Kaufman of NYT phoned me today on this matter. Asked me if I knew why wordpress had been asked to freeze postings for the three days? – because FOIA had posted a link to a Russian server in the blog comments. Asked me if I knew who FOIA was? No. Asked me
whether anyone had contacted me in connection with the current investigation? No. Asked me if I had any idea why FOIA had released additional emails with a password? I had read speculations about it, but other than that, no. Asked me if I was a suspect? To my knowledge, no and that there was no reason why I should be.

kimsaid

It’s the aftertaste, GHowe, she lies. See the insinuation that the leaker is unserious. See the statement that investigations have cleared the scientists of wrongdoing.

She should read the emails. She would be doing the readers of the Times a great service by accurately reporting the deception. It’s a precis of the whole mess, and she is just flat in error to present it as she did.
=============

The old ditty, “You take the hi road and I’ll take the low road” is playing.
I think we can agree some kind of ‘cating is present, just a diff. of degree.
I’m surprised the phrase “con men” made the cut. Their side got in “hacker”.
Also, I’m glad the skeptic’s blogs don’t have “executive director”s yet!

GHowesaid

Its just as well. My own thrombosis was caused by taking advice from a Senator and remain in my seat with belt on while flying due to all the extra turbulence nowadays from GW er CC. I’m thankful it was in my artificial leg, which I could replace, tho it wasn’t cheap. :)